


apokálypsis

by Triss_Hawkeye



Category: The Bifrost Incident - The Mechanisms (Album), The Mechanisms (Band)
Genre: (but in reverse), F/F, Go Mad From The Revelation, Horror, The Bifrost, Trauma, Yuletide Treat, cosmic horror
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-12-20
Updated: 2019-12-20
Packaged: 2021-02-26 05:08:04
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,112
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21877900
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Triss_Hawkeye/pseuds/Triss_Hawkeye
Summary: Loki’s mind is a mess. And then it isn’t.
Relationships: Loki/Sigyn (The Bifrost Incident)
Comments: 8
Kudos: 69
Collections: Yuletide 2019





	apokálypsis

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Mayarene Rose (Paradise_of_Mary_Jane)](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Paradise_of_Mary_Jane/gifts).



Everything between the lock on her compartment door getting busted open, and being dragged into Odin’s personal carriage was a blur. That’s nothing new. Everything’s a blur to Loki, has been as long as she can remember, and all she knows is that she definitely can’t remember everything. Her vision is fine, her hearing as well if not her ability to process it, but it all goes into her mind twisted and out of order, full of gaps and thoughts that slip from her grasp even as she tries to pin them down. 

Odin is alternating between stalking up and down the carriage and staring out of the windows that make up almost the entire left and right walls of her personal observation deck. Loki watches her dully for a while, unable to comprehend why her motion is so jerky and disjointed, like a glitching playback or movement under strobe lighting. But eventually her own eyes are drawn to the swirling colours of the Bifrost as well.

The rainbow light of the wormhole rushes by the window in a swirling stream. Odin seems to find it calming, captivating, but to Loki’s eyes it appears to churn and bubble with strange forms, just out of focus so that if she tries to pin down the movement it disappears. She doesn’t know why she tries. Only that she feels she must. 

In her staring, fragments of warped and corrupted memory superimpose themselves upon the rainbow backdrop. The sensation of fingers gripping her arms, being led onto the writhing steel worm, tripping on things that weren’t there, running her hand along the compartment floor and feeling it crawl under her fingertips. The face of the woman who’d found her, a face that should maybe have been familiar but even as she watched became a mosaic of unrecognisable fragments, her voice distant and incomprehensible, her presence momentary and gone in a flash. Figures and equations and symbols ingrained in her mind like muscle memory with no idea of their context or meaning, just the compulsion to recite them under her breath, a non-stop mutter of words and numbers and shapes crossing her lips as if with enough repetition she could unearth their purpose. And all the while beneath it all she sees the screaming, convulsing body of a woman dying to searing light and maddening pain, an endless instant frozen in jagged time—and the woman’s face, contorted in agony, is the only clear thing in her spinning head, clear as if seen in a perfect mirror. Her own. 

Odin makes a couple of cycles of approaching Loki and speaking to her, possibly asking a question—Loki is unable to make sense of the sounds coming from her mouth but finds herself responding just as often as staring up at the All-Mother blankly—and wandering back to the window to gaze out again. Eventually she stops approaching Loki altogether, just meanders from one window to the other and back, or stares intently at the door, an ornament on her desk, the camera on the wall, for what could be minutes, or seconds, or aeons. 

For as long as she can remember, Loki has felt nothing but frustration and confusion. And dread—a deep, bottomless dread that extends far deeper into herself than her feeble scrabbling at the surface of her mind allows her to explore. Most of the time it lurks below the level of her consciousness, but now within the Bifrost she can feel it falling away beneath her like a yawning void. And yet she still does not know why. The truth is buried somewhere inside her, encoded in the flesh of her form, and it feels as though time is running out but no matter how hard she tries the answers slip away from her like oil on water, shimmering and rainbow-coloured. 

Loki shudders involuntarily and is suddenly still. Alarmed, she looks up to Odin and sees that she too is frozen in place, wide-eyed in anticipation, having felt the same thing—a ripple through reality like the chime of a bell, followed by a deceptive silence, the receding before a tsunami.

And then the carriage gives an almighty judder as the train careens from its tracks, and Loki’s vision ripples as if looking through rain running down a window, but this is no water that she sees—this is the fabric of reality itself, warping and tearing away from itself like putty, twisting and spiraling until, like an optical illusion resolving itself, the tangled tatters of existence align exactly with the tangled tatters of her sanity. And suddenly, her mind becomes perfectly clear. 

Loki remembers everything.

She remembers her increasing dismay at uncovering the cursed mathematics of the Bifrost, the profane workings of what they were trying to do. She remembers turning traitor, doing everything in her power to stop it. She remembers being captured, preparing to die with conscience clear no matter what Asgard may say of her. She remembers what Odin did to her instead, blasting her with the pure, unfiltered truth of the Bifrost, a truth so incompatible with this pale shadow of a world that it had detached her mind from it almost completely, even as she gained an incomparable understanding of the rainbow wormhole’s nature and workings. And now the Bifrost _is_ reality, and Loki understands in an instant the terrible consequences of what has just happened.

She confronts Odin, but Odin is already lost to a raving ecstasy, the ruin she has become simply the completion of a deterioration that began decades ago. Her grinning mouth stretched wide in rapture, the All-Mother is beyond reach. It’s a vain effort at any rate. Loki has plumbed the depths of her own dread, which has become entirely transparent to her, and possesses the knowledge that, were any sane person left on this train, would drive anyone else to madness from the sheer terror of it—that of all the dark and eldritch possibilities offered by the infernal mechanisms of the Ratatosk Express, none of them offer a way to reverse the inevitable doom that will follow now.

But Loki remembers one more thing. She remembers her wife. The shape of her face, the sound of her voice, her sharp mind and compassion, her loyalty and tenacity. Loki is filled with overwhelming love, even as it bleeds with grief and agony at what must happen now. She knows that Sigyn will be able to hold on until Loki finds her. If nothing else, neither of them will die alone. 

With the closest thing to hope on this twisted train of nightmare, Loki steps into the chaos, towards her fate.

**Author's Note:**

> All my wishes for a sane and happy holiday period. Happy Yuletide!


End file.
